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Artists create the world’s biggest E Ink public art at San Diego airport

The electronic paper display developer E Ink created the electronic ink technology behind Amazon’s Kindle ebook readers. Now it is using that same technology to help create Dazzle, a giant public programmable art installation at the San Diego International Airport.

The San Diego airport tapped an experiential design firm, Ueberall International, to create a public artwork on the side of the airport’s new rental car center. Ueberall decided to use E Ink’s Prism technology to create black-and-white “pixels” on gigantic tiles across the 1,600-feet-long facade of the building. Dazzle uses more than 2,000 individual solar-powered titles that can be programmed to arrange themselves into a mutable mural.

Paul Apen, chief strategy officer at E Ink, said in an interview with VentureBeat that the technology for ebook readers scaled up to the large tiles using the same general principles that make ebooks work.

“This is the largest electronic paper installation in the world,” Apen said.